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by plurality



Category: Transistor (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Augmentations, Body Modification, Deus Ex: Human Revolution inspired, Gen, Kinda AU?, Pre-Canon, because augs are my jam
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-01
Updated: 2014-08-01
Packaged: 2018-02-11 09:12:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 586
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2062377
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plurality/pseuds/plurality
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Because talking about Cloudbank and body modifications leads to talking about augmentations, and that leads, inevitably, to Royce Bracket.</p>
    </blockquote>





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**Author's Note:**

> Because talking about Cloudbank and body modifications leads to talking about augmentations, and that leads, inevitably, to Royce Bracket.

When he is twelve years old, Royce breaks his femur, and is rushed to the nearest hospital. Looking back, he supposes that the reason he doesn't remember _why_ or _how_ is because what came after far overshadowed what came before. Everything else is unimportant. Trivial, even.

What came after was this: the hazy aftermath of the reconfiguring surgery, and x-rays that show metal plating and metal rods holding his bones together. And it's as if the gears in his brain begin to creak into motion.

His mother often catches him prodding at his cast, wriggling his fingers underneath to at least feel the solid form underneath soft flesh. He is always scolded, but as soon as the cast comes off, he presses the tender skin just above a metal plate. How very right. And how very…inadequate.

Royce trails his fingers along the side of his parents' car, and thinks about his own body, about its fragility, its ephemeral state. Soon, in months, in years, in decades, perhaps, ruts and crevasses would form, like the old street map-shape of his grandmother's face, and later: rot and wither away to be dust in the wind. He feels the weathered, but still durable, outer shell of the car, and wonders.

* * *

 

If Royce were a more spiritual, or more inclined to flights of fancy, he would have described his awareness of self as a shadow. A shade formed just outside the body, only barely connected to it by its own consciousness. Able to feel things, good and bad, but he's never truly settled into his own skin.

Anchored by the pins and plates locked into his bones, his perception of his world sharpens to a knife's edge. There, a stain on his right arm, where he burned himself months ago; and there, the smooth arches of the iron rails lining the boardwalk. He catches sight of modifications that do not change, even if the mere appearances do - glimpses of permanence in the wake of the ephemeral.

He reads OVC news feeds of the marriage between science and choice, augmentations and modifications, with a buzzing in his veins, and the pins-and-needles feeling under his skin.

When Royce finally submits himself to the knife, he sends in a request form for a recording of the entire procedure. So, as he's hooked up to various valves and pumps, sensors and plugs, he finds himself staring at the lens above him. A distant eye, he thinks, as the anesthetic needle pricks his veins, of a bigger whole.

(After. After, after, he puts on the video on his terminal and watches as surgeons, mechanics cut open his shoulder, saw through the bones of his flesh. Destruction in its most clinical form. And then, the construction, the creation. Nerves to wires to connections to bolts to skin to metal to eternity.)

He wakes with the feeling of cotton in his mouth, a bluntness to his thoughts, and an ache in his neck. But. When he lifts his right arm, skin and bones don't answer. A whirr of interlocking plates and gears, and his new arm responds. Royce lets out a breath he didn't know he had been holding, and fumbles with his other hand to trace the ridges and grooves of the interlocking metal.

"It'll feel strange, for the first couple months of recuperation. We did just introduce multiple foreign elements into your body," says the doctor, and Royce wants to laugh.

 Strange? Foreign? What he feels is quite the opposite. It's like coming home.


End file.
